


Adventures of the Neo!Wreckers

by darthneko, White Aster (white_aster)



Series: Everything's Coming Up Kittens [2]
Category: Transformers (Bay Movies), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Family, Future Fic, Kid Fic, Mercenaries, Mpreg, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-11-09
Updated: 2011-11-09
Packaged: 2017-10-25 21:04:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/274773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darthneko/pseuds/darthneko, https://archiveofourown.org/users/white_aster/pseuds/White%20Aster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tens of thousands of years after the Wars, Cybertron is a rebuilt world. The sparklings of the survivors have grown up on stories of war heroes, and some of them have vowed they want to keep the legend alive.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Living Legends

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Warrior Goddess 1 - Earth](https://archiveofourown.org/works/173913) by [White Aster (white_aster)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/white_aster/pseuds/White%20Aster). 



"Did you get your mail?" Ratchet demanded, almost before Mikaela made it through the door.

"What? No, I've been in meetings all cycle and you would not _believe_ those idiots... why? What happened?" Ironhide, bless the mech, was trotting out all of the manners to make up for what the medic was currently lacking, and in short order Mikaela has a seat in the main room of the pair's quarters, a cube of high grade, and a tight comm burst of Ironhide's amusement at his mate's fuming temper, underscored with some sort of relief.

Her inbox was, unsurprisingly, full of unread messages. She took a sip of the high grade - which had something new in it, a trace element different from the last batch which Mikaela belatedly translated as something... Spicy? Maybe? Something like that, probably Ironhide's doing as he always said he preferred it with a bite to it. The important part was that the distillation had Ratchet's signature kick of content which surged like a heat bomb through her energon lines before settling down to have a pleasant chat with her circuits - and dug into the mess, sorting through it with the ease of long practice.

Council bullshit, council bullshit, senate bullshit, committee bullshit ( _that_ went straight into the trash, do not pass Go, no credits for you, because they had been the biggest and most useless waste of her time lately and she was sick of the sight of them). Something from Ravage which was _never_ bullshit because the head of Cybertron Security (" _Really?_ " she'd asked, "That's what you're calling it? Why not just call it your not-so-secret ninja spy clan?" Ravage had gone quiet for a moment, probably querying Integrus' Earth data files, and had shrugged, a sinuous motion that started in his forequarters and ended at the tip of his barbed tail. "I suppose I could make black our uniform color, but it seems narcissistic, don't you think?") never sent frivolous messages. Not even the one time she had provoked him into a LOLcat war. That hadn't been frivolous, that had been pure comedic genius _gold_ and she was saving that last filebyte of the picture of him glaring up at the security cameras with banks of monitors behind him and the caption "basement cat iz watching u" forever and ever and always, amen.

She was about to open the message from Ravage, assuming that it was whatever had gotten Ratchet's diodes in a twist, when she glanced a little further down the list and ohOh _OH_ -

She might, possibly, though she would deny it later, have made a sound suspiciously like a squeak. "Oh, thank _god_ , they made it!"

"Oh _yes_ ," Ratchet snarled, throwing himself down into a chair. "Limped their way to some backwater Colony freehold settlement, safe and sound. Apparently they blew their communications array out when they broke atmo like the authorities were after them - maybe because oh, _wait_ , the authorities _were_..."

Ironhide cupped a large hand over the medic's mouth. "Let her read the message, Ratch'."

The message was short and to the point - the Trion Revival and all 'crew' were safe and accounted for, repairs were being made, apologies for inconveniencing everyone back home, please don't worry, and they'd send something better when they had more to report. It was signed by all three of the missing Academy dropouts, Brightsteel, Coruscate, and Solaris, and copied to all of the families. Mikaela half choked on a mouthful of high grade for laughing. "Oh Jesus, I need to see if Ravage caught Starscream's reaction on camera. That had to be _priceless_." There were two other signature tags attached as well and she paused over them. "Who're..."

"Their mechanics," Ironhide rumbled, voice thick with laughter. "They found a couple of engineers to ship out with 'em and keep that damned deathtrap flying."

The tags were horribly familiar. "Pip and Mer? Aren't those..."

"Wheelie's," Ratchet interjected, the growl of his engine underscoring the one-time Decepticon-turned-Autobot's name with a vicious glee. "Those two micro-sized delinquent twins of Wheelie's, the ones who skipped out on the Academy entirely and ran off to the colonies to set up shop or homestead or whatever it is they're doing..."

"Apparently," Ironhide rumbled, mimicking Ratchet's previous tone, though the effect was somewhat marred by the heavy sound of his amusement, "being respectable mechanics until Brightsteel offered them a job on a stolen experimental military ship."

"Priceless," Mikaela repeated, grinning. "Absolutely fucking priceless. Wheelie's gonna be _so proud._ "

"You shouldn't encourage them," Ratchet griped, but Mikaela, who had been hearing it all for a decavorn ever since the kids had pulled the hijack, let the familiar rant slip by her audials. There was a second message from Solaris, sent to her alone, that she eagerly unpacked. It was full of nothing but visual file attachments and she laughed, scrambling up from her seat.

"Sol sent pictures! Here, I'll forward them."

It barely took a moment to forward the message, attachments and all, to Ironhide, who turned around and transferred them to the house terminal so that they could all cluster around and look. There, better even than a signed message, were holos of Ratchet and Ironhide's sparkling, looking insufferably pleased with himself against a backdrop of ship consoles behind him. There was one of Coruscate, who was reaching out as though to stop the holo taker, wings hunched around his head in embarrassment, and one of two bright colored partial blurrs which might have been flashy maintenance drones but which Mikaela was fairly certain were Wheelie's twins. There were assorted shots of ship interiors and one of her own sparkling, kicked back with his feet on a console and just as pleased with himself as Brightsteel.

The last holo was of the Trion Revival itself, taken extravehicular, framed prettily against the curve of the planet it was in orbit above and a spattering of stars behind it, the light of the system's sun picking out all of the details of the sleek little ship. "Looks like it's breaking speed limits while sitting still," Mikaela said fondly. "Sol's granddad would be _so_ proud. He's a late bloomer, but at least he stole a really _hot_ ride."

"You're not _helping,_ " Ratchet hissed, but he was crowding her shoulder to look at the small console display all the same.

There was a splash of color on the last holo, standing out against the ship's otherwise almost drab paintjob. Mikaela cocked her head to one side, optics contracting in a zoom before spiraling back to normal as she surveyed the tiny holo message. "Why did they mark the Trion Revival as salvage?"

"Eh?" Ratchet leaned around her, taking a closer look at the palm sized image of the little ship, and then at the even tinier image of the Cybertronian glyph that had been rather sloppily painted in splashes of vibrant teal across the side of the hull. "Wreck... oh no." He shuttered his optics briefly, thumb and finger digging into the plates around them as he huffed a sigh through the vents of his back. Straightening up, he leveled a glare and an accusing finger at his mate. " _THIS_ ," he snapped, "is entirely YOUR fault."

Ironhide's armor flared briefly in surprise. "How in the Pit is it _my_ fault if the kids've gone space happy?"

Ratchet, however, wasn't having any of it and a step took him right up into the other mech's space, his knuckles impacting none to lightly against Ironhide's chestplate with a ringing sound. "Oh? And WHO decided old war stories were appropriate sparkling entertainment? And now _YOUR_ sparkling has run off - AWOL from the Academy, I might add, in a _stolen ship_ \- to restart the _WRECKERS!_ "

Mikaela stepped back as Ironhide's hands came up, reflexively shoving the medic out of his personal space. "That's hardly MY fault! And since when is it _'MY'_ sparkling? Takes two to make one, last I checked!"

That was another argument that Mikaela had heard until she could practically repeat it verbatim, but with a new term that she wasn't familiar with inserted. "...What's a Wrecker?"

Ironhide snorted. "I'm sure I told you some of those stories - special combat team, back in the Great War. Impactor, Springer, Kup... Perceptor was with 'em, you met him. Brightsteel liked those stories, always wanted to hear about Springer..."

Ratchet threw up his hands. "Because you never told him how Springer _died_! Or Kup, or any of the others! There wasn't a single Wrecker who survived the wars!"

"Sure I told him," Ironhide huffed. "When he got old enough to ask. Lots of mechs died in the war, that's what war _was_. 'Steel knows that. Stories didn't do any harm, and besides, Primus, Kup was a fragging _legend_ in his time. Springer too. All of 'em. Mechs like that deserve to be remembered."

Ratchet made a strangled sound of static. "For being suicidal gung-ho _psychopaths!_ Every single one of them was glitched in the head!"

Mikaela, for her own part, had queried her databanks and unarchived the resulting pings. Studying the holo of the ship exterior, she could piece out how the painted glyph was modified from "wreckage" to the proper designation "Wreckers", and the unarchived history files were painting a 3rd hand picture of a rough and ready team of crack soldiers, the ones to call in for every worst case job when collateral damage didn't matter.

The rant Ratchet was rapidly working his way into was derailed when Mikaela dropped right where she was, leg struts folding under her as she laughed so hard that her vocalizer bled out into static, and then harder still, air intakes stuttering and frame shaking.

"Oh God," she managed to eventually rasp out, her optics flickering. "Oh Primus... they've gone to go play mercenary pirate!"


	2. Coming Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ratchet only _thought_ being a parent was difficult the first time around.

The delights of carrying - which Ratchet had always considered overrated if not an outright falsehood, possibly infiltrated into their social language from a similar saying on Earth and then entrenched by the first giddy wave of sparklings after all the long vorns of war - were proving to be even more exaggerated than he had suspected. Sure, the outcome was usually worth it, but after overseeing the medical care of numerous carrying cycles in both mechs and femmes as well as his own mate's gestation of their firstborn, he had _thought_ that he had a fairly accurate and realistic idea of all of the permutations that the actual ordeal involved.

The universe, because it was the Pit-begotten spawn of the Unmaker, delighted in proving him wrong.

One decacycle into the stupidest bit of folly he'd ever talked himself into and he had an all new sympathy for what Ironhide had gone through... Or he would have, if the rusted out bucket of scrapped solenoids hadn't been hovering like a processor damaged overprotective gyrfalcon on a nest of eggs half the time, until Ratchet couldn't stand the sight of him, and nowhere to be found the other half of the time whenever Ratchet _did_ need him. Which would be right then, when the comlink was chiming an insistent incoming call. Ratchet, who was stretched out on the berth which he had yet to get up from that day because every little thing, from sitting up to _cycling ventilations_ , had threatened to send his gyroscopes into another error ridden sickening loop of failures that left him only _wishing_ his tanks would purge, groaned and ruthlessly pinged his mate on the local-wavelength in the hopes the other mech would drag himself out of whatever project he was working on and answer the slagging call.

No response. Wherever Ironhide had gotten to, it was out of immediate range.

The comm kept chiming. Ratchet glared hot slagged death at it and finally, gingerly, pushed himself up. The error cascade had thankfully diminished but by the time Ratchet had slithered off of the berth and half stumbled to the console he had already run through the basic curses and progressed to metal-blistering phrases picked up in five different languages, two of which were long dead, and the comm was _still chiming_.

He slammed his hand down on it, partially to steady himself as a new flood of errors flashed up and partially to _shut the slagging thing up_. "Someone," he snarled into it before the connection had even gone through, "had better be _dying_."

There was a pause as the com holo flickered into life - offworld, it had to be, nothing else took that long - and resolved into the somewhat startled looking face of their eldest sparkling, his voice thin and flattened by the com lines and the distance. "...Dad?"

"Oh," Ratchet spat sourly, holding tightly to the edge of the console as his sensors insisted, against all laws of physics, that the room had abruptly rotated 36 degrees on the Y axis and -28 on the X. "Look who _finally_ crawled out of the Pit and decided to call home."

Brightsteel looked taken aback by his parent's vitrol but Ratchet, who was grimly fielding a multitude of errors from assorted overstrained systems and power fluctuations, was less inclined to social niceties and restraint than he might have been otherwise, even for sparklings. " _So_ nice of you. You know, it's generally considered polite to offer congratulations sometime _before_ your younger sibling finishes sparking, and since I still have two thirds of this fragging misery to go I suppose you get first marks for effort. What do you want?"

For a heavily armored front line warrior, it was astonishing how round and wide Brightsteel could cycle his optics. " _You're_ sparked?" he yelped.

Ratchet gripped the console as his sensors spun another few degrees off kilter, his own optics narrowing dangerously. "I _assume_ Ironhide told you?"

"No!" Brightsteel denied, and then, flustered, "I mean, yes? Maybe? Primus, he sent a note, I assumed he meant _he_ was sparked, he carried _me_ after all, and I was going to call but then the whole mess at Cygna Alpha went down and..."

His words were coming faster the more he talked and Ratchet's processor felt as though flying apart into component shrapnel was a viable and entirely possible option. "Stop," he barked, in the tone that froze medical students in their tracks, and then, sharply, " _Breathe._ " It was one of the stranger bits of medicine he had picked up from organics, made even more so by the fact that it worked on Cybertronians; Brightsteel obediently froze and the comm line dimly picked up the sound of a deep intake cycle which eased some of the rapidly building jitter from his frame. Growling too low for the comm to pick up, Ratchet gingerly rested his hip against the console, trusting - in as much as the console was bolted to the floor - that it was steadier than his own legs were. "Alright," he sighed, "you're off the hook for that one, then, and I'll reformat your Carrier later for that little oversight. Yes, I'm sparked. You're going to have a sibling in two decacyles. I trust you're somewhere where making it home in time won't be out of the question?"

Brightsteel was already nodding vigorously. "Absolutely, Creator. We'll be there."

"Good," Ratchet grunted, except it wasn't because he wasn't truly angry at the little glitch and Brightsteel should have known that but their sparkling was still staring across the com with huge, overly bright optics and a nervous twitch in his frame. And he had just called Ratchet 'creator', the Cybertronian word that had been replaced by the less formal human English 'dad' almost as soon as the once tiny bitlet had assimilated the language packs. Most of the time. Unless he was in trouble.

Ratchet scowled at the holo of his first child. "What the Pit did you do?"

"Nothing!" Brightsteel said hastily, in a tone that assured exactly the opposite. He had, Ratchet thought sourly, entirely too much of his carrier in him - neither Ironhide or his sparkling could lie for scrap. "Nothing, I mean, it's not really something we _did_ , er, not exactly, it's just... um... nothing you need to worry about, really..."

Ratchet bit back something that quite probably would have sent Brightsteel ducking, despite the inability of his creator to chuck anything at him through the lightyears separating them. "Brightsteel. What. Did. You. _Do?_ "

"Nothing!" Brightsteel repeated, bordering on desperate. "Look, ah... Can I talk to other Dad? Please?"

"No," Ratchet roared, "you may not! The half clocked glitch isn't here, and if you disconnect this line, scraplet, I will hunt your aft down and disassemble it! Now what did you do and what slagging jail do we have to come break you out of?"

"No no no _no_ ," Brightsteel was all but babbling. "It's nothing like that, I promise, I swear! We're fine, we're all fine, no jail, nobody's hurt, I mean, not really, I just wanted you to look over the scans but it's _nothing_ , it's _fine_..."

Ratchet shuttered his optics and carefully drew in the deepest ventilation cycle that he could without sending the underpowered system into another flurry of errors. He did it twice more for good measure, painstakingly edited every word that wanted to fly from his vocalizer, and then refocused on the comm holo of his sparkling. "Brightsteel. _Breathe_ , and then start from the beginning. What scan? What's wrong? Why are you calling?"

"It was an accident!" Brightsteel burst out, the words an almost hissed wail. "It was an accident, I didn't even catch the anomaly until now, oh Primus, it never even occured to me to look and itwasanaccidentandithinkwemightbesparked!"

The tail end of his words came out in a blurred hysterical rush. Ratchet, who had spent vorns serving with Bluestreak and Blur both, took a moment to unarchive the tiny code packet that he had once routinely run long, strung together vocalizations through and let it scrub his sparkling's babble into something better approaching understandable. The result made him reboot his optics and vocalizer both. "...Primus. Are you sure?"

Brightsteel had his face in his hands, fingers curled around his audios and shoulders hunched, a pose that had been spark wrenchingly pathetic on a tiny sparkling and was somehow even more so on a fully matured warrior. "No," he moaned. "That's why I wanted you to check the scan."

There was a chair just out of reach on the other side of the console. Ratchet eyed it wearily, wondering if he could stretch far enough to reach it without losing his grasp on the solid surface of the console that was helping to orient up from down. "Can you transmit the readings?"

His sparkling made a vague affirmative sound and reached to fiddle with controls on his end. The data packet came through perceptibly slowly across the distance; Ratchet watched it load in silence and then cued it up as it finished. It was a standard medical spark reading and he didn't even have to look through the full results to know what he was looking at. "Primus spare me from young idiots," he groaned. "Congratulations - it's exactly what you think it is. Who is it? Solaris?" Brightsteel made a low, unintelligible noise, and Ratchet bit back his own groan. " _Please_ tell me it's Solaris. Please tell me you didn't spark Starscream's blasted winglet. I don't _care_ how fragging pretty you think Seeker frames are, if you sparked him we are _never_ going to hear the end of it from Screamer. _Never_."

Brightsteel was shaking his head back and forth, face still buried in his hands. Ratchet narrowed his optics again. "Scraplet, if you tell me it was one of the twins, I will _laugh_ at you."

His sparkling's vocalizer made a hiccuping sort of noise as Brightsteel rebooted it. "N-no, no... um... no." One blue optic peered forlornly out from the gap between his hands. "'s me. That's my scan."

The chair was no longer optional. Feeling every one of his many vorn, Ratchet carefully sidled around the edge of the console far enough to grasp at the chair and drag it back to the comm reception, sinking into it with a low ventilation. "Alright," he said steadily. There were error messages about his gyroscopes and the fluctuating energy flow to his ventilation systems scattered everywhere across his HUD; he activated medical protocols and shunted them all aside, scrubbing them ruthlessly until he had a clear processor stream to work from. "Same question, Brightsteel, just in reverse. Who was it? Solaris? Or Coruscate?"

Brightsteel was already shaking his head and Ratchet lifted a brow ridge. "Who else are you fragging that I don't know about? Or do you mean _you_ don't know?"

That got a nod. Ratchet propped his elbows on the console, digging his thumbs into the current-fed ache he could feel throbbing up from his processor. "You don't know. I take it that it could be either one? Yes." He groaned, shaking his head. "Alright, I'm going to assume this was brought about by an overcharged critical failure of your gestation buffers. Scraplet, just how much high grade was involved in this?"

"Lots," Brightsteel moaned mournfully. "Tons. I'm _still_ defragging and it was six cycles ago."

"Figured as much," Ratchet sighed. "What do the other two have to say?"

"Haven't told them yet," Brightsteel muttered. "Wanted to talk to you first, make sure I was right."

"Oh, you're right," Ratchet agreed heavily. "You're sparked. About half a decacycle behind me. Any errors?"

"Nothing major," Brightsteel admitted, slowly unwinding. "Just thought it was a patch error, bit of an energy sink."

Ratchet grimaced. "Lucky you," he said. "You can thank your Carrier for that one - with any luck you won't have any more trouble than Ironhide had with you." He straightened, leaning towards the holo. "Alright, scraplet. Listen up. This is what you're going to do." The image of Brightsteel straightened as well, already nodding. Ratchet suppressed a wry smile. Youth, he reminded himself, and the stupidity that came with it, was something everyone eventually grew out of. Thank Primus. "Go tell Sol and Coruscate. They have every right to know, and neither of them strike me as the type to leave you hanging."

Brightsteel gave him a small grin. "They've had my back against sharkticons. I think I trust them for this."

Ratchet nodded. "Good. I'll take care of 'Hide. _You_ will tell them, and then you will get your aft back here _yesterday_ , do you hear me? _Immediately_. I've seen the medbay you have on that ship and you and Sol still don't make any sort of proper medic between you. I want your aft here where I can do your scans myself."

Brightsteel winced. "Dad, if you're sparked too... you really shouldn't..."

"Do _not_ ," Ratchet snapped, "try to tell me what I should or shouldn't be doing. Your Carrier's been trying that for ten times as many vorn as you've been online, and you can ask _him_ how well that works." Relenting, he reached out, fingertips hovering a scant breath from the holo. "Scraplet... come home. Whether your bitlet has wheels or wings, we'll deal with it, even if I have to gag Starscream. It'll be fine. Come home."

Brightsteel's hand came up, hovering just shy and countless lightyears distant from Ratchet's own, his optics as bright as they'd ever been in the sparkling Ratchet could all too easily remember carrying on his shoulder. "We're already on our way."


End file.
